This invention relates to containers and more particularly to containers for packaging food items such as frankfurters, hamburgers, or the like.
The container art is aware of tray-type containers for packaging of food items, the containers fashioned from paperboard or other stiff, foldable, and resilient sheet material. An example of known containers of the general type of this invention is seen in U.S. Pat. No. 4,856,707 issued to Lorenz. That construction exhibits the advantage of a tray which may be latched to another tray of identical construction to form a closed container, thus obviating the requirement that the bottom tray or bottom container be of a construction different from that of the top tray. While apparently satisfactory for the purpose intended, the Lorenz construction suffers the drawback that of the four possible ways of aligning the top tray to the bottom tray, two of these positions will result in forming a locked or complete container. This feature defeats those situations where it is desired that both the bottom and top be aligned in a desired, predetermined manner so that the graphics on both the bottom and top tray will be aligned. Because of the two possible ways of effecting locking of the Lorenz construction, the desired alignment of graphics is sometimes no realizable due to the fact that the operator placing the top tray on the bottom tray, with a food product therein, may inadvertently assemble the trays in misalignment vis-a-vis graphics.
Another and ever more important disadvantage of the Lorenz construction is that containers of that type are necessarily square, it not being possible to form oblong rectangular trays according to the Lorenz construction wherein both the top and bottom trays are identical and wherein the trays will interlock.